Happy Birthday Nelson Mandela!

Friday was the birthday of the recently deceased civil rights
hero Nelson Mandela. Two decades after the end of apartheid,
however, it appears that Mandela’s dream may be turning into a
nightmare. In May of this year, Reason TV took a critical look at
South Africa’s current political scene.

“Life After Liberation: Triumph and Tragedy in South
Africa,” by producer Rob Montz. Approximately 10
minutes.

Original release date was May 5, 2014. The original writeup is
below.

“This government—our government—is worse than the apartheid
government.”—Archbishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1994 Nobel
Peace Prize.

South African voters are headed to the polls this week for the
fourth national election since 1994, when Nelson Mandela was
elected president after the end of the apartheid regime.

Their country represents epic history in our lifetimes. After a
decades-long struggle against brutal, state-run racial segregation,
the black liberation movement emerged victorious in the early
1990s. Led by the transcendent figure of Mandela, South Africa
swiftly dismantled the apartheid apparatus and, defying dour
predictions of a bloody race war, peacefully transitioned to
majority rule. Mandela’s government ushered in pluralistic
democracy on a continent long-defined by colonialism and autocracy.
State officials established remarkably robust constitutional
protections for individual rights.

Black South Africans would finally be afforded the economic and
social opportunities they’d been denied for so long.

Or so everyone had hoped.

Two decades later, Mandela’s promise of renewal has largely gone
unfulfilled as Mandela’s party, the African National Congress (ANC)
has maintained its huge electoral majority. The beautiful dream
animating the South African experiment is crumbling amidst ongoing
corruption, violence, and failed economic policies. As Nobel Peace
Prize recipient Desmond Tutu has said of the current regime, “This
government—our government—is worse than the apartheid
government.”

“Life After Liberation,” directed and hosted by Rob Montz,
details the role played by political monopoly in South Africa’s
post-apartheid decline. The documentary shows how the ANC has grown
corrupt and complacent—and how widespread resentment of the ruling
political class is now fueling the rise of a populist demagogue,
Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters, who is pushing
precisely the sort of Mugabeist socialist policies that have ruined
so many other African countries.

About 10 minutes.

Go
here for links, downloads, and more resources about this video
and South Africa.